The economics of writing technical books

I've had four technical books published and I've finished writing my fifth which I'm in the midst of negotiation with publishers about distributing.

I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them.

However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:

I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one. According to this blog, 96% of books (mostly fiction) sell less than 5000 copies per year. For technical books, it may be worse.

I've heard that 10k number before. I've also been told by one of my publishers that 2k copies is the break even point for them. While I've had the fortune of three out of four of my prior books selling more than 2k copies (and one selling many, many more), it seems that a significant number of traditionally published programming books do not. And I'm sure that ratio is even worse for self-published books.

In fact, I think the "Reality Check" section of the article is not harsh enough. The author cherry-picked some data on very well selling technical books, which doesn't make the point well. The reality is simple: the vast, vast majority of programming books do not sell "well" (let's consider "well" 10,000 copies) and many don't even break the 2,000 copy barrier, even from traditional publishers.

So, what are the economics of technical book writing? Not good. And it's only going to get worse as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage.

So, do it because you really want to do it for another reason (career, teaching, etc.). Not to make money.

I wrote several books. My first book was terrible but sold very well because there was no Stackoverflow, OS platforms did not spend enough to support developers, and their documentation sucked. None of these are true anymore. Also printed books as a medium is in sharp decline. My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies.

Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my project management content. That will probably turn into a series of YouTube long form video lessons.

Writing a technical book is an extremely bad idea that could only be pursued by idealistic fools, blow hards and obsessive ideologues.

Here's mine:

https://hypermedia.systems

Slight OT: can anyone recommend websites that have good technical documentation?

What I mean by “good”, is the design & layout of the technical documentation is easy to consume and visually appealing.

(I’m revamping my customer facing tech reference docs and wanting have a visually appealing doc but not so much visually appeal it becomes distracting)

Yes, don’t write technical books for the money. But also do! If you approach the book as a business venture, there’s plenty of money to be made.

Here’s my recap of making almost $400k over a few years of working on books-and-such as a sidebiz alongside a full-time job. Not all of it was from books directly, a lot was from opportunities that the books unlocked. And that’s not even counting how the books enabled me to sponsor my own visa/greencard to come into USA and unlock oodles of opportunities.

The main insight I’ve learned is that the book is a product. Write your thing for someone to benefit from. What [useful thing] will they be able to do after reading your book that they weren’t able to before? How does it help them get more of what they want faster?

https://swizec.com/blog/5-years-of-books-and-courses-or-how-...

Sharing this to encourage, not to brag. We need more insightful and useful books out there.

If you’re gonna do this, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Write Useful Books first. Wish it existed when I started. http://writeusefulbooks.com/

In 2020 I wrote a book on FFmpeg after going through the entire FFmpeg documentation. I wanted to learn FFmpeg inside and out by actually using it to convert audio/video based on what the documentation offered. In the end I open sourced the results as an extension to the official docs[0] and then released in on Kindle as well[1].

In the last 4 years I've sold 743 books which is just shy of $2000. Still I love the fact that every month I'll get a KDP payout email and it feels more gratifying than my own FAANG+ paycheck for some reason.

[0] https://github.com/jdriselvato/FFmpeg-For-Beginners-Ebook [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087GYV15Y/

I have written a textbook on using Cubase (a DAW), but including all the background that I think you need to be well-rounded (music theory, audio concepts, mixing, effects, instruments, etc).

It took me 2 years to write, one of which was all my spare time, so probably about 9 months to a year's full-time work.

Then I found out no-one bought it! Only pure chance led to it being promoted by someone in the industry, maybe 2 years later. I've kept it updated (started on Cubase 6, now on Cubase 13), and it sells reasonably well; maybe £400 a month in revenue, typically for me. So it's not a big earner, but it pays some of my bills, and means it's worth the 2 weeks of work (average) to update it each time Cubase releases a new version.

All of this is selling via Amazon, worldwide, print-on-demand. Previously on Lulu but they were really just sub-contracting on Amazon and while you get less money per copy on Amazon, it out-sells Lulu by 3x (and then Lulu discontinued the sizes I was using so it was a no-brainer).

I've done another book (which is less of a seller in terms of price and numbers), and quite enjoy them, but it's difficult and I think it's more a case of "if I have the time spare I can put this work in and eventually it will pay me back" - possibly over a year or two...

On that note, you can just do it for the good of the world. A lot of us have high-paying day jobs that can support us and good writing can be done on the side.

Benefits include not needing to hit some page count (so you can be concise), and bug reports from the community.

I don't look down at people who make money from books at all. I admire all writers and editors. (Some publishers can go f themselves, though. :)

But there is another path available to many of us, one that isn't driven by money. Remember the old hacker ethic!

I've written 9 technical books, including 4 for a major publisher (Apress), and 5 independently (https://wjgilmore.com/). One of these books (Beginning PHP and MySQL) has incredibly reached its 20th year in print[1], and has been translated into a bunch of languages. Many years ago I also wound up editing ~70 or so books for Apress plus a few for Wiley. In summary I know this business pretty well, and still follow it closely despite not having participated in it for several years.

My advice is this: if you want to write a book, then write it. But if you do have this sick, twisted desire to spend countless hours writing and editing your work, telling yourself you are an idiot, not good enough, and a horrible writer, then at least do so with the thinking people are going to read it and as a result you will make money. Set yourself up for the possibility of success. How can you do this?

* Package the book in different ways (print, print + videos, print + videos + consultation). This has been extraordinarily successful for me personally.

* Use the amazing Leanpub.com to do the book production (turn your Markdown into PDF, epub, etc). Not an affiliate or whatever, just mentioning it because you will save untold hours of pain.

* If you want to work with a publisher (and in 2024 I don't suggest you do), then choose very, very wisely. There are two who I would even consider working with today, and even in those cases I would absolutely not cede the usual rights.

Hope this helps, Jason

[1] As of this fifth edition my name is no longer on the book due to a disagreement with the publisher.

Is this really how anyone under 60 learns technical information in 2024? I realize SWE job posts are down but... this is a terrible idea lol

I think this is a fairly accurate article, although I think it overlooks the indirect benefits of writing a book.

My book, Effective Haskell (https://pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/), is a pretty well reviewed book on a fairly niche technology. It's been in print for about a year, and was in beta for around 6 months before that. I'd estimate I spent around 4,500 hours over 5 years writing my book and the royalties so far mean that the value of that time was around $5/hour pre-tax. That hourly rate will go up slowly over time until the book stops selling, but it's pretty hard to argue that it's objectively worth it just for the royalties.

My motivation for writing the book was never the money, and I've generally treated the royalties as a nice bonus. I started writing because I cared a lot about the technology, and I wanted to share it with other people. Writing the book was my way of contributing something to a community that I'd benefited from a lot in my career.

In addition to the satisfaction, there have been other benefits I've seen to writing a book. It's opened up opportunities for other side income. I've had paid speaking opportunities, and I've been invited as a guest lecturer at a couple of universities and been offered to chance to design and teach a course at a well ranked local university. If I wanted to actively pursue consulting as a side gig I think the reputational gain would help me there as well.

Writing a book has also helped me in my career. In a direct way, I think the benefit to my reputation helped me get interviews. The communication and technical writing skills I gained writing a book have also helped me as I've moved into a leadership role. It's impossible to know precisely how much writing a book contributed or to put a clear monetary value on that, but I do think it's contributed.

The other side of this is that, a year after finishing writing on my book I'm still recovering a bit from the burnout of working so intensely on a side project for so long. I still have some follow-up work (extended solutions to all exercises, errata, fixing up and publishing some cut chapters as free content) that I intend to take on and it's been really hard to find the energy to do it. I'd like to write a second book one day, but I'd still advise people to be mindful of the amount of work it takes and to avoid writing one unless they are absolutely certain that it's something they want to do.

The prospects for making money selling as an artist (author, painter, athlete, musician, actor) are so poor why do they care so much about copyright law?

The route to riches for, say, a musician is to become famous and charge for the coliseum seats to hear him play. To become famous doesn't it make more sense to give the music away? Being famous means you get high consulting rates, get paid for personal appearances, get paid for putting your name on sneakers, etc. A famous author could get paid for writing movie scripts or snagging a professorship or teaching seminars.

If copyright law disappeared tomorrow, would the artists really be worse off?

It would seem like the real $ in in Substack. Lots of writers making >$50k year of passive, recurring income to write maybe one or two articles a month. Good work if you can get it, compared to writing a full-blown technical book and earning less.

I don't think I'd have the stomach to spend a year writing something that I think is really good only for it to end up on libgen a couple days later.

There’s a hack if you work in Developer Relations for a tech company.

1. You write the book as part of your job during the workday. 2. Your company buys the published book to distribute at events and conferences for free. 3. The book seems successful and you get paid. 4. The book gives you credibility in industry events and may even help you get a special visa if you need one.

Full disclosure: I have never written a technical book, but you should if you work in Developer Relations.

I have written a few tech books:

https://ryanbigg.com/books

Off these, I’ve made $65,000USD. That’s over 13 years. None of these books have sold anywhere near as close to the Unicorn Project! (Which imo is fanfic for the tech-inclined)

The money is nice, but hearing from people who’ve read the books (especially those who ask questions!) is the best part.

Huh, maybe it is the friends we make along the way after all.

One big thing about selling books or courses is the constant social media promotion required to maintain sales.

Lots of YouTube channels are really just a platform to advertise their product.

For anyone else interested, I highly recommend reading through Rob Fitzpatrick's "Write Useful Books":

https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...

It isn't about technical books exactly but it does speak mostly on how to write recommendable non-fiction, some of which can obviously be technical. It's got a lot of practical advice for the actual "doing" of the book, and has inspired me to at least start dipping my toes in.

I wrote and contributed to several programming books, back in the glory days when your local bookstore had shelves of 1500 page tomes on programming topics. It really is true that you didn't do it for the money - up to six months work for a couple of £k up front and then meager royalties if it sold. ISTR that in my case 6k sold was when the royalties kicked in.

I did it mainly because I was starting up as a consultant and trainer, and having your name and picture on a book was a huge plus. A second benefit was that you learn a lot when writing a book; not just about the dark corners of the topic, but also about long form writing and how to express yourself.

But publishers, though... I'll just say that if I was going to do another book I'd try self-publishing, make more from my labour, and save myself a lot of hassle.

This lengthy article can be converted into a publishable book sellable on Amazon

Pretty good article.

Publishing anything these days is a long tail game. Outliers make $.

If you want to make money from a book, you need to promote it, self published or not.

As the article correctly states, writing a book is a good idea for many reasons, but generating income isn't among those.

My personal experience: during the golden days of the technical book market, a good 15-20 years ago, writing a chapter would net you $1500 (for, like, 2-3 weeks of work, better pay than a magazine article that would take approximately the same time but pay a bit less) an entire book maybe $25K, but that would take you at least 6 months to complete.

Of course, that was just the upon-completion payment, with the promise of later royalties if the book did well, but, unless you were very lucky, that pretty much never happened.

Still, a payment of $2500-in-todays-dollars for less than a month of work isn't entirely bad, and being a published author did have its perks for getting consulting gigs.

But these days, "a magazine or book deal that pays actual money" just isn't a thing anymore, so, yeah...

so writing books at GitHub

I enjoy reading posts like this. Very thorough description. I am wondering if someone has insights into how the publishing model for more traditional publishers like Wiley and Elsevier work. Those guys are selling books for more than $200. Does the author get more money from their sales or is it all absorbed by the publisher?

Donald Knuth's Mathematical Writing had a lecture from Jeffrey Ullman, On Getting Rich.

https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic...

Things haven't changed much. The absolute numbers are similar and discounting for inflation, worse.